Model reference · open weights
granite-3.1 is an open-weight language model from IBM. granite-3.1-2b-instruct-quantized.w4a16 (INT4) weighs 1.7 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
Summary of the ibm-granite/granite-3.1-8b-instruct model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.
What it is
| Released by | IBM |
|---|---|
| Released | 2024-12-06 |
| Parameters | 8.2B |
| VRAM | 1.7 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Requests at once | Context max | Memory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8K each | 32K each | |||
| RTX 3060 12 GB | 13 | 3 | 111K | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | 19 | 4 | all 128K | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | 31 | 7 | all 128K | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | 31 | 7 | all 128K | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | 42 | 10 | all 128K | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | 62 | 15 | all 128K | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | 113 | 28 | all 128K | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | 108 | 27 | all 128K | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | 131 | 32 | all 128K | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | 152 | 38 | all 128K | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | 197 | 49 | all 128K | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | 254 | 63 | all 128K | 176 GB |
| Requests at once | 8K tokens each | 32K tokens each |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2.9 GB | 5.0 GB |
| 5 | 5.6 GB | 15.7 GB |
| 8 | 7.6 GB | 23.8 GB |
| 16 | 13.0 GB | 45.2 GB |
| 32 | 23.8 GB | 88.2 GB |
| 64 | 45.2 GB | 174 GB |
One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.
Builds
| Build | Params | Precision | Weights | Smallest setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| granite-3.1-8b-instruct ↗ | 8.2B | BF16 | 16.3 GB | 2× RTX 3060 12 GB |
| granite-3.1-2b-instruct ↗ | 2.5B | BF16 | 5.1 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
| granite-3.1-1b-a400m-instruct ↗ | 1.3B | BF16 | 2.7 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
| granite-3.1-2b-instruct-quantized.w4a16 (above) ↗ packaged by RedHatAI |
2.6B | INT4 | 1.7 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
From the model card
Model Summary: Granite-3.1-8B-Instruct is a 8B parameter long-context instruct model finetuned from Granite-3.1-8B-Base using a combination of open source instruction datasets with permissive license and internally collected synthetic datasets tailored for solving long context problems. This model is developed using a diverse set of techniques with a structured chat format, including supervised finetuning, model alignment using reinforcement learning, and model merging.
Supported Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic, Czech, Italian, Korean, Dutch, and Chinese. Users may finetune Granite 3.1 models for languages beyond these 12 languages.
Intended Use: The model is designed to respond to general instructions and can be used to build AI assistants for multiple domains, including business applications.
Capabilities
Generation: This is a simple example of how to use Granite-3.1-8B-Instruct model.
Install the following libraries:
pip install torch torchvision torchaudio
pip install accelerate
pip install transformers
Then, copy the snippet from the section that is relevant for your use case.
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
device = "auto"
model_path = "ibm-granite/granite-3.1-8b-instruct"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_path)
# drop device_map if running on CPU
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_path, device_map=device)
model.eval()
# change input text as desired
chat = [
{ "role": "user", "content": "Please list one IBM Research laboratory located in the United States. You should only output its name and location." },
]
chat = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(chat, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
# tokenize the text
input_tokens = tokenizer(chat, return_tensors="pt").to(device)
# generate output tokens
output = model.generate(**input_tokens,
max_new_tokens=100)
# decode output tokens into text
output = tokenizer.batch_decode(output)
# print output
print(output)
Evaluation Results:
Model Architecture: Granite-3.1-8B-Instruct is based on a decoder-only dense transformer architecture. Core components of this architecture are: GQA and RoPE, MLP with SwiGLU, RMSNorm, and shared input/output embeddings.
Training Data: Overall, our SFT data is largely comprised of three key sources: (1) publicly available datasets with permissive license, (2) internal synthetic data targeting specific capabilities including long-context tasks, and (3) very small amounts of human-curated data. A detailed attribution of datasets can be found in the Granite 3.0 Technical Report, Granite 3.1 Technical Report (coming soon), and Accompanying Author List.
Infrastructure: We train Granite 3.1 Language Models using IBM's super computing cluster, Blue Vela, which is outfitted with NVIDIA H100 GPUs. This cluster provides a scalable and efficient infrastructure for training our models over thousands of GPUs.
Ethical Considerations and Limitations: Granite 3.1 Instruct Models are primarily finetuned using instruction-response pairs mostly in English, but also multilingual data covering eleven languages. Although this model can handle multilingual dialog use cases, its performance might not be similar to English tasks. In such case, introducing a small number of examples (few-shot) can help the model in generating more accurate outputs. While this model has been aligned by keeping safety in consideration, the model may in some cases produce inaccurate, biased, or unsafe responses to user prompts. So we urge the community to use this model with proper safety testing and tuning tailored for their specific tasks.
Resources
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.